Towards the end of his life, Augustine sent forth a pair of treatises on grace in response to the written appeals of two lay admirers of his theology, Prosper and Hilary. These men had voiced their concern to him that groups of monks in southern Gaul, Marseilles in particular, were attempting to secure places for human initiative inside the formidable edifice of predestinarian theology. Without wishing to be grouped with the discredited Pelagians, the monks nevertheless hoped to find some alternative to what they understood to be Augustinian fatalism, or theology which seemed to deny human beings any say over whether they would join and persevere in the company of the saints. Augustine's response to these fifth-column Pelagians, who would come to be known (misleadingly) as semi-Pelagians, took the form of the two aforementioned treatises, De praedestinatione sanctorum and De dono perseverantiae, finished and delivered sometime near the end of 429. These works, though enshrined in Augustine's corpus of writings against Pelagians, have not been favored by contemporary admirers of his theology, who tend to see in them the rigidity and exasperation of an old man worn out by continual challenges to his most deeply held views. John Burnaby catches the mood of the scholarship when he states, perhaps harshly, that “nearly all that Augustine wrote after his seventieth year is the work of a man whose energy has burnt itself out, whose love has grown cold.”

Augustine looked for wisdom beyond what he could find in the pagan philosophy of antiquity, whose principal luminaries have given philosophy its venerable, if remote, parentage. When seen through the prism of his theology of grace, this parentage is difficult for us to make out, for it has been transfigured by interests that seem alien to its origins. We are less sure of Augustine's midwifery in philosophy than we are of his paternity in theology. For the young man who read Cicero's Hortensius and burned with enthusiasm for philosophy defended, as an old bishop, a wisdom remarkably different from the one Cicero sought to impart to Latin culture. Augustine's break with ancient philosophy earned him his undisputed place at the foundations of medieval theology and culture, but it also roused the suspicion that his rejection of classical learning in favor of the revealed order of Scripture indicated a break from philosophy itself.

There have been few willing to accept Augustine's development of his doctrine of sin and grace as commensurable with the philosophical investigations of the pagan schools of antiquity. The various schools that come under fire in De civitate Dei – the Platonists, Peripatetics, Stoics, and Skeptics (novi Academici) – all depend on reason for illumination. Augustine, for his part, darkens reason with sin and insists on tying the human quest for knowledge to the influence of divine power upon human willing.

Christian social morality and the best state

In the fifty years after its first publication in 1516, Thomas More's Utopia appeared in ten further Latin editions and in French, Dutch, English, German, and Italian translations. Widespread and profound as its influence was, its ambivalance generated both utopian and anti-utopian imitators. In other words, the spread of More's fictional device – the ‘discovery’ of an ideal society – was not always utopian in its political thought and the utopian impulse proper was not necessarily derived in the profoundest sense from the imitation of a model.

The fifteenth-century rediscovery of Plato and Plutarch stimulated the early modern ‘best state’ exercise and encouraged a debate on constitutions which replicated the seed-bed out of which the classical utopia had sprung (Logan 1983; Ferguson 1975, p. 28; Manuel and Manuel 1979, pp. 95–100). But some aspects of civic humanism and of Reformation thought endorsed and broadened the idea of social redemption through individual moral performance, typified for the late middle ages by the Mirror of Princes tradition (Skinner 1978, 1, pp. 126–35). Still others gradually excited a vast outpouring of millennial expectation, especially on the Protestant side of the Reformation divide. These two traditions of discourse about social idealisation – by individual moral effort or by a millennial and literal coup de grace – were quantitatively much more important in early modern Europe than the reemergent utopian mode which existed in dialogue with them. It is helpful, therefore, to distingish utopianism as a form of social idealisation.

Continuities with the medieval past are no less evident in the political ideas to which the Protestant Reformation gave rise than in the religious and theological commitments that characterised it. In both respects, however, it constituted also a striking break with the centuries preceding, and scholars have devoted an enormous amount of attention to wrestling with the problem of continuities and discontinuities. By a long-established route, the characteristic approach to Martin Luther's startling departures in word and deed from the norms of medieval orthodoxy and the dominant patterns of late medieval political thinking sets out from the decline of the later medieval papacy into legalism, fiscalism, confusion, and corruption. Encompassing the onset of the Great Schism in 1378, the emergence in the conciliar movement of a constitutionalist opposition to the jurisdictional claims of Rome and in the policies of European rulers of a set of comparable claims that overlapped and rivalled them, that approach moves on to the more radical challenges posed to the whole hierarchical order of the church by such heretics as the Waldensians, Wycliffites, and Hussites. It takes special note of the rise of the nominalist theology and of the retreat from the externals of religion reflected in the mysticism of Germany, the Netherlands, and England, as well as in the later flowering of the devotio moderna and the humanist philosophia Christi. And it terminates on the eve of Luther's great challenge with an emphasis on the deepening tension between the intense piety – ‘churchliness’ even – of the populace and the increasing calcification of the ecclesiastical establishment, and a concomitant emphasis on the growth of anti-clericalism (Moeller 1965, pp. 3–31, 1966, pp. 32–44).

Scholarship and power: a problematic partnership

In 1599 the Habsburg archduke and his Infanta came to the university of Louvain to hear a humanist teach. The outstanding local scholar Justus Lipsius proved more than equal to this challenging task, as he explained to a friend in a characteristically immodest letter:

The political ideas examined in this volume were generated in a period that requires its historians, in an especially marked degree, to ‘look before and after’. A watershed between ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ European history has conventionally been located in the late fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth – the period which saw the final eclipse of the Byzantine Empire, the flowering of the humanist Renaissance, and the first stages of the Protestant Reformation. Yet the society of the three centuries following that period has increasingly been represented as a ‘world we have lost’ – a world essentially pre-modern because pre-industrial (at least in terms of what Marx called ‘machinofacture’) and pre-capitalist (if by ‘capitalist’ we mean to refer to a society having an urban proletariat as a major characteristic). Demographically, the population explosion accompanying the social transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought into being mass societies of an unprecedented kind. In political terms, it is true, there may seem to be less reason to question the modernity of the period here under scrutiny. There is a genuine sense in which the ‘sovereign state’ – even if its lineaments are more clearly discernible in medieval Europe than has sometimes been supposed – took firmer shape in and after the sixteenth century. Yet even here the need to distinguish an ‘early modern’ from a later phase is evident. The European nation-state of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a very different entity from the typically dynastic states (or the surviving republics) of that Ancien Régime which was shaped in the period with which we are here concerned.

The political thought of John Locke is concerned with four problesms that every major political theorist faced in the seventeenth century. These are: a form of government that would not lead to oppression or civil war, an arrangement of religion wars, a set of applied arts of governing appropriate to the early modern mercantile states in a balance of power system, and the epistemic status of religious and political knowledge. This chapter is a survey of Locke’s response to the first two problems; sections i to vi consider the first and section vii the second (for an introduction to the latter two, see Tully 1988). Recent scholarship has shed indispendasble light on the political events and pamphlet literature in England which provided the immediate context of Locke’s writings on government and religion (Franklin 1978; Ashcraft 1980, 1986; Goldie 1980a, 1980b). In addition to this context, I will suggest, the political issues Locke confronted and the concepts he used were also part of a larger, European crisis in government and sustained theoretical reflection on it (Rabb 1975).

Government

The first problem is, what is government – its origin, extent, and end? It is classically posed in the subtitle of the Two Treatises of Government. Locke worked on this issue from the Two Tracts on Government (1660–1), to the Two Treatises (1681–9), moving from a solution of absolutism and unconditional obedience to one of popular sovereignty and the individual right of revolution. The question is not about the nature of the state as a form of power over and above rulers and ruled, although he was familiar with this reason of state way of conceptualising early modern politics and sought to undermine it (TT, I.ix.93, p. 248, II.xiv.163, p. 394).

Sharp chronological lines can seldom be confidently drawn across the page of any historical record – and never in the history of ideas. Yet a book must end somewhere, and it is desirable that the point at which it ends should be supported by some kind of rationale. In the present case, that rationale cannot well be derived from the general history of the period. The turn of the century in 1700 was not, even if we allow for some years' margin on either side, distinguished by any significant turning point in European development. Yet in intellectual history there is at least a certain sense, at that point or soon afterwards, of a stage being cleared by the demise of leading characters. Of the major thinkers discussed above perhaps only Leibniz (d. 1716) survived much beyond the earliest years of the new century. And by coincidence the year 1704 was marked by the deaths of two figures whose ideas encapsulate some of the main contrasting and indeed conflicting tendencies in the political thought of early-modern Europe.

John Locke and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet did not, it is true, meet in controversy as Filmer did, posthumously, with Locke. Yet there is, it can be said, an implicit dialectic in which the thesis advanced by Bossuet, particularly in his Politique tireé des propres paroles de l'Ecriture sainte, is met and challenged in Locke's Two Treatises of Government. Where Locke sees an all but indissoluble link between power that is absolute and power that is arbitrary, and an almost inevitable degeneration from that conjuncture into the tyranny of the ruler and the slavery of his subjects, Bossuet rejects both the equation and the deduction: for him the king's absolute power, neither despotic nor tyrannical, is ‘sacred, paternal, and subject to reason’.

The idea o f constitutionalism

The term ‘constitutionalism’ had no currency in the political thought of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A nineteenth-century augmentative of ‘constitution’, itself derived from the Latin (constitutio), the term signifies advocacy of a system of checks upon the exercise of political power. Such a system is commonly taken to involve the rule of law, a separation of legislative from executive and from judicial power, and representative institutions to safeguard the individual and collective rights of a people who, while governed, are nonetheless sovereign. As we shall see, ideas which would contribute to later conceptions of that kind were present in the thought of the period. But for those thinkers the term ‘constitution’, which certainly formed part of their technical vocabulary, conveyed a very different meaning. They used it first and foremost in a sense consistent with the definition to be found in Justinian's lawbooks, a definition which drew no distinction between the legislative and judicial spheres: ‘whatever the emperor has determined (constituit) by rescript or decided as a judge or directed by edict is established to be law: it is these that are called constitutions’ (Institutes, 1.2.6). A constitution was an explicit declaration of law by the prime political authority. Hence, in England, Chief Justice Fortescue's view that ‘when customs and the rules of the law of nature have been reduced to writing and published by the sufficient authority of the prince and ordered to be kept, they are changed into a constitution or something of the nature of statutes’.

Patterns of controversy

The preceding chapter has outlined the development of Huguenot doctrines of resistance during the first half of the French religious wars. It was one of the ironies of the time that, in the second half, some French Protestant writers turned to support royal authority while their most bitter enemies among Catholic enthusiasts occupied the vacant ground with Catholic theories of resistance. The Holy League, in which these doctrines were evolved, relied not only upon secular justification of armed opposition but also upon the power of the papacy to depose temporal sovereigns and authorise armed opposition for religious reasons. In response, royalist theory was associated with the tradition of independence within the Gallican church. In England at the same time the Anglican settlement was defended against Puritan pressure for further reform and a Catholic campaign for reconversion that in one aspect was peaceful and non-political and in another welcomed papal deposition and foreign invasion. Not surprisingly, English and French royalism had much in common, however different the institutions and traditions of the two countries. In the early seventeenth century a European debate took place over the respective powers of kings and popes which invoked and redefined ideas generated by the French Holy League.

The three principal strands in secular Huguenot resistance theory were also contained in the ideas of the League. There were: loyal resistance to malevolent and Machiavellian advisers who had usurped royal authority; constitutional opposition to a king who had overstepped limitations defined by law and history; and communal defiance of a tyrant in the name of the ultimate power, or ‘popular sovereignty’, of the commonwealth over the ruler.

Sources and resources

The contribution of seventeenth-century republicanism to the development of western political thought was made principally in England. In Italy the vitality of Renaissance republicanism had been largely extinguished by 1600; in Holland the emergence of the independent United Provinces produced little systematic exploration of republican principles; in France, Spain, and the empire the domestic opposition to the advances of absolutism was particularist rather than republican. In England, the breakdown of political institutions between 1640 and 1660 stimulated a more profound reexamination of political belief and practice. The ideas of the English republicans are not easy to classify. Writing in order to shape events, they adapted their arguments and their emphases to immediate circumstances. Usually writing in opposition to the prevailing power, they drew heavily on ideas of contract and resistance and of natural rights which were not peculiarly republican. Their constitutional proposals were flexible, and the form of government often mattered less to them than its spirit. The term republican was not, on the whole, one which they sought, and was more commonly one of abuse. Nevertheless, a republican tradition can be identified which was to enter the mainstream of eighteenth-century political ideas in Britain, on the continent, and in America.

In the emergence of that tradition there were three main stages. The first, and most fruitful, belongs to the Interregnum of 1649–60. It was a response to the execution of Charles I in 1649, to the abolition of monarchy and of the House of Lords in the same year, and to the ensuing failure of a series of improvised Puritan regimes to provide a durable alternative to kingship – an alternative which the republican writers of the Interregnum sought to provide.

Endings, in the history of ideas, are no easier to identify with certainty than beginnings. Scholasticism, that product of the mature intellectual culture of medieval Europe, was to experience, even within the period surveyed in this volume, more than one revival. Revitalisation might indeed be a better term; for that which has not died need not in the strict sense be revived, and there is ample evidence to indicate that the scholastic tradition, however exhausted it might seem at times to be, clung stubbornly to life. The advent of the printing press ensured the preservation, the transmission, and the wider dissemination of many scholastic texts. Nor was this characteristic only of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – when it was only to be expected that what were still the standard works in theology and philosophy would be committed to print. Well into the seventeenth century we find, most notably, the twelve-volume edition of the work of Duns Scotus published in 1639. A year later – an instance of particular relevance here – Jean Buridan's commentary on Aristotle's Politics was printed at Oxford. The place is as significant as the date – as a reminder that academic conservatism played its part in keeping the scholastic mode alive. Hobbes' attack on the schoolmen – from whose works, nonetheless, he no doubt took more of his ideas than he cared to acknowledge – indicates, again, that the doctrine he had received at the turn of the century was still to the fore some fifty years later.